Apple pages file type should be added to MIME types

[David D Lowe]

LibreOffice can open .pages files (from Apple pages). However, the mime type for these files is incorrectly just application/zip:

$ file --mime-type example.pages
example.pages: application/zip

Instead, it should be application/vnd.apple.pages .

This would allow the user to associate LibreOffice Writer with these types of files, and use it to open this file. (LibreOffice Writer can open .pages files)

Apple Keynote files should have this MIME type: application/vnd.apple.keynote

Apple Numbers files should have this MIME type: application/vnd.apple.numbers

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: mime-support 3.64ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-29.33-generic 5.4.30
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-29-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Thu May 14 14:46:40 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-11-11 (550 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180725)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: mime-support
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-04-18 (25 days ago)

[Charles Plessy (plessy)]

Hello,

You can add `application/vnd.apple.pages pages` in `/etc/mime.types` on your system, and I will do it in a future update of the `mime-support` package, but it will not effect the output of the `file` command, which uses a different database.

You can open a bug on the `file` package to request it, but please have a look if you can at <https://github.com/file/file/tree/master/magic> before: as you will see, unless you can provide a “magic number” for that format (a proprietary format from a proprietary software, if I may comment), it may not be possible to detect it.

You can also have a look at the `shared-mime-info` package for another way to associate the `.pages` file suffix to the `application/vnd.apple.pages` media type.

Have a nice day,

Charles Plessy

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Could you add an example of a such file to the bug?
How do you want to open the files? If it's from e.g nautilus then mime-support isn't the right place where the mimetype needs to be defined but rather shared-mime-info

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

I created a bug report in shared-mime-info's issues tracker here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/-/issues/136

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

As requested, here is an example of an Apple Pages document, taken from an online templates website.

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

A fix was released upstream in shared-mime-info 2.2 (2022-03-27). Sadly, this didn't make it to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The 2.2 version is in kinetic, it would be possible do include the change in a stable update if it was determined to be important enough which is unclear at this point since that report was the only report of the issue so far

[David D Lowe (flimm)]

Fantastic! I can confirm that this is fixed on Ubuntu 23.10.